If the merger between the Digital Property Group’s portals and Zoopla goes ahead, then the resulting business would dominate the rental sector – knocking Rightmove into second place in terms of agency users.
On the same criterion Rightmove would, however, stay ahead on sales – but only by a whisker.
The claims come from market analyst Doug Shephard, business development director of property search engine Home.
He predicts that a price war would result.
A decision on the merger had been promised by the OFT on March 1, but yesterday afternoon the OFT said there was no update.
But if the merger does proceed, then Shephard says that in terms of portal customers – ie, agents – rather than web traffic, then it would be bigger than Rightmove for lettings.
Shephard said: “Taking a look across sales agencies, we estimate that Rightmove covers 76% of agent offices, FindaProperty 61% and Zoopla 39%.
“FindaProperty and Zoopla combined would cover 71%. However, if we add in the lesser-known Mouseprice (part of the DPG stable), it’s neck and neck with DPG’s overall percentage of sales offices coming out at 75%.
“The booming rental market on the other hand presents a very different story.
“Rightmove covers 68% of letting agent offices, FindaProperty 62% and Zoopla 41%. FindaProperty and Zoopla combined would cover 73%. Add in Mouseprice and the TPPG letting-agent share reaches a Rightmove-busting 78%.
“Our assessment of the likely impact of the proposed merger suggests that Rightmove would be knocked into second place by the superior market presence of TDPG and Zoopla in the rentals sector.”
He went on: “Should the merger go ahead, Rightmove would be expected to fight back by attempting to increase their share of rentals. This potential battle of the giants should lead to price competition, which would help reduce the costs of both selling and letting.”
Comments
Why do it Patrick? Come on. If you are old enough to remember VFD you will probably remember bundles of the free newspapers chucked in skips. Same goes for portals.Big numbers sell space!
There are all kinds of things that could be going on with the figures but it is no-one's job to check, those commercial companies monitoring at present think we honestly believe that 2/3rd the UK population want to move every month.
Traditional KPI's suggest there is about 2,000,000 looking to sell/buy. 1,500,000 looking to rent
Any claim above that needs looking at closely
Re the Page views - what is the number ? This is the number of pages viewed so if RM have 145 million and they look at 10 pages then that is 14 million - if you think about this - there is the landing page (1) then the search page (2) then poss the details search or the confirmation on which town (3) then the results pages and say some looks at 5 pages thats now (8) they then register (9) confirm ther T&C (10) then change their mind and do a search at another price range (11) to search page (12) results (13) look at another 5 pages (18) .............. so it is easy to see why the figs can be so high - but also one of the reason RM are so far ahead the site is "sticky" and people stay along time and look at alot of the pages .... hope this helps
@Shhhhhhh! interesting thought to click to and away from your site all day and there are programs out that could do this - but why would you ? the public at large do not look at page views figures and 2nd you will harming your Google rankings - .... why ? .... google now measure what they call "Bounce Rate" i.e. how long someone stays on a site and if you are clicking away from this every few seconds Google will read this that your site is not "relevant" to the search so they will drop you down the rankings !!!! so to all you agents making your site interesting so people stay is now important .............
Remaining menbers would be more like it.
Propertylive is like Hillbillie's sister's child, everyone is just a bit unsure who the daddy is and coz it is so ugly, malformed and unpopular no-one is going to claim responsibility.
One thing's for sure, dressing it it pink didn't convince anyone its a girl.
Hahaha!! That'll never happen.
@Rebel on 2012-03-08 12:04:49
May I just say that I refer to those existing members of NFoPP - who obviously belong - that they should advertise their free portal more.
Politely, it is up to them!,
@ Ray Evans:
Who the hell wants to be a member of the NAEA?
@Patrick on 2012-03-08 11:13:25
Thank you for a most informative post which I accept at its face value.
The most staggering stat. is that of Propertylive which is free to NFoPP member agents. I do understand that the site may need tweaking but I can only say (as I have for many months) it is the agents fault that the public, in the main, are unaware of Propertylive and therefor most cannot possibly use it! The agents should include it on all of their advertising & literature - just as they did and do with RM - which in my view is the source of the original build-p of the success of RM
It is worse than that, you have to add all them figures together, they are unique visitors!
Someone pointed out that the total in a year adds up to more than the population of the world!
Either there is an Afterlife or there are Aliens
All those figures you quoted are made up, I can click on my own site all day long and quick enough I can get to 150 million per day.
However if I were a bit of a techie I would program something to click a bit faster than my fingers and get to 200 million per day.
Last month we got told that 2/3rd of everyone in the UK is looking to move home in reality about 9 % are active.
It seem someone is not being very accurate with the figures and most agents are swallowing when they ought to be spitting.
Patrick has exposed what a smoke and mirrors con trick the whole thing is.
Rightmove : 144.6 million daily views !!!
Think about it. The population of England is 51 million. So what the hell are "views"?
It certainly isn't 51 million men women and babies with repetitive left mouse click syndrome.
The whole thing is garbage.
What rubbish and I am surprised this article has been allowed into the EAT – the calculations behind it are misleading and I think incorrect :
Q: do you measure effectiveness of a website by the number of agents signed up ? if so, propertylive run by the NAEA must be one of the top sites in the UK – we all know this is not the case.
Rightmove : Traffic Rank 28th* Largest site in UK
Zoopla : Traffic Rank 104th* largest site in the UK
Findaproperty : Traffic Rank 145th* largest site in the UK
Primelocation : Traffic Rank 280th* largest site in the UK
Propertylive : Traffic Rank 22327th* largest site in the UK
*Alexia Ranking
What is important to agents, is the ability for the website to contact the agent to the consumer – that is it, no other measurement is relevant, so where do the sites perform best ? we need to look at estimated traffic data:
Rightmove : 144.6 million daily views
Findaproperty : 18.7 million daily views
Primelocation : 10.4 million daily views
Zoopla : 22.7 million daily views
Propertylive : 90,000 daily views
*Checktraffic.com Avg over 7 days
What we must also consider is the merger will not automatically combine PL, FAP & Zoopla traffic there will be cross over with users and leakage to Rightmove and therefore Rightmove may well benefit form this proposed merger.
What is I think curtain is if the merger goes ahead then prices for Zooplaprime will rise 3 fold and Rightmove will not see any reason for not increasing there fees next year as the dominant player, in fact they are less likely to reduce costs which may allow (in there view) the agents budgets to be split to a competitor.
All bad news for the agent and consumer ........
I really dont know why, but non of the portals really work for us - Not for lettings anyway. Its Gumtree all the way..
We all know how much turnover and profit rightmove made, but does anyone know what the figures are for zoopla and findaproperty?
findaproperty website is jusy AWFUL to look at..beats me how on earth can they call this site a multimillion pound brand!
Question for the Editors...and Doug maybe...
How many letting agents are these percentages based on?
I agree, we use all three currently but RM still produces 85% of our leads. As you say, its web traffic that counts.
What nonsense.
That's like suggesting an AOL and Yahoo merger would be bigger than Google.
Web traffic is all that matters. Zoopla and FindaProperty could be in 100% of offices but they'd still be clumsy to use and of limited use. We resent RM's high prices but they do what they do cleanly and with ease.
Does anyone ACTUALLY use Zoopa as a first choice? Their purchase (and subsequent ruining) of House Prices is a good example of why they'll not beat RM.